BY ALAN BRUNACINI
Last month I described my experiences with two projects that involved a big dose of organizational change. The EMS example turned out very well and has resulted in a huge changeover in how we have used our basic resources to assist the community over the past 30 years. The Total Quality Management (TQM) experience provided a good example of a change agent (me) starting out with a bad size-up of the change recipients. I simply was overmotivated to create a bandwagon that the troops had no interest in getting on. The TQM experience taught me to put a longer listening beginning on any new idea. Although the TQM experience died a quick, natural death, the process did produce one positive lesson: A major TQM principle is that effective organizational behavior must become customer centered. That idea caused us to “discover” Mrs. Smith and to begin to deliver service in a more emotionally literate manner.
EMS and TQM are just two examples of the ups and downs of my going to change school throughout my career. As part of my studies, I have had the chance in my travels to meet and interact with many fellow fire officers who were also attempting to make changes that would take their systems up to another level. A consistent concern I heard, and still hear, in these change discussions is the challenge of creating a performance management system that yields consistent, sustainable improvements along with a uniform level of performance throughout the organization. It seems that most fire service change agents are struggling to produce program improvements that “stick” because they have an effective ready-aim-fire beginning, middle, and end (follow-through). They are also attempting to do a set of management things that somehow gets everyone in the organization to do basic operations the same way.
We have discussed before that it is fairly easy for eager, ambitious change agents to start a new program and how fire companies who have lived through a lot of program beginnings and not many program endings don’t get overly excited about the latest and the greatest. We also hear the consistent frustration that arises from the fact that how we do operational things depends mostly on the personality and preference of the highest ranking officer who shows up (remember the differences between the left/right turn battalion chiefs described in earlier columns?). We connect and describe the differences in how officers do things in terms of our department demographics: “We have five battalions and three shifts, so we have 15 different fire departments.”
As a young (and dumb) assistant chief, I beat big lumps on my head trying to go through the concrete change wall attempting to solve these two fundamental (and timeless) fire department management problems. The more I invested in strengthening program front ends, the more the troops rolled their eyes, because every revision I did looked like a new program. The faster I chased the battalion chiefs around burning buildings and the louder I yelled at them to do things the same way, the more it became a contest (one of me/18 of them)and the more they did it “their way.”
I knew I could not give up because unless we could somehow create lasting program improvements and a uniform level of department performance, our firefighters would eventually be murdered by the consistent fireground close calls we were experiencing. We many times would be one step ahead (literally) in the race with the lethal tactical conditions chasing us out of a burning building.
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The more I tried to fix the programs and the more I chased the BCs around the fireground, the more I was making everyone in the organization nuts. One day at lunch, I was pouring my heart out to a wise old officer (medicine man) who routinely helped me understand reality. He had the knack of quietly listening to my ravings, shaking his head, and then scribbling fewer than 10 words on a napkin that instantly produced a no-brainer answer to my most recent earth-shaking problem. The following is the little diagram he scribbled:
He then patiently explained that I must develop a management model that has a complete set of steps that starts with an organizational agreement on how a particular activity will be performed. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) were born for me at that moment. Next, he said those SOPs must become the training basis for what is expected of the players. After we are trained, the SOPs must become an Operations Manual that becomes a playbook for actual operations. After the “fire,” we must ask how well the SOPs worked and how well the players played. Then we make whatever revisions were required based on how we answered the critique questions. I grabbed the napkin, paid the check, and did exactly what he told me to do for the next 35 years.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
